Senior Software Engineer, Site Reliability

About Upstart

At Upstart, we’re united by a mission that matters: to radically reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing for all Americans. Every day, we bring creativity, experimentation, and advanced AI to reshape access to credit, helping millions move forward financially with clarity and confidence.

As the leading AI lending marketplace, we partner with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through technology that’s both radically intelligent and deeply human. Our platform runs over one million predictions per borrower using more than 1,800 signals, powering smarter, fairer decisions for millions of customers. But the numbers only hint at the impact. Every idea, every voice, and every contribution moves us closer to a world where credit never stands between people and their financial progress.

We’re proudly digital-first, giving most Upstarters the flexibility to do their best work from wherever they thrive, alongside teammates across 80+ cities in the US and Canada. Digital-first doesn’t mean distant. We’re intentional about in-person connection through team onsites, planning sessions, and moments that spark creativity and trust. And whether you choose to work primarily from home or collaborate in-person from one of our offices in Columbus, Austin, the Bay Area, or New York City (opening Summer 2026), you’ll have the support to work in the way that works best for you.

If you’re energized by tackling meaningful problems, excited to innovate with purpose, and motivated by work that truly matters, we’d love to hear from you.

The Team:

Personal Loans Engineering owns the applicant journey and experience as they move through the loan application and verification process. PL Engineering is a conversion- and revenue-critical part of Upstart’s flagship product. The team brings single-threaded ownership to an experience that is aligning funnel outcomes and architectural evolution around one goal: maximizing originations while maintaining trust, risk integrity, and compliance.

• Set technical direction for the applicant funnel
  • Define and drive the architecture of the end-to-end “Got Rate → Funded Loan” journey
  • Identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks impacting conversion, latency, and reliability
• Lead large, cross-team initiatives
  • Own ambiguous, high-impact efforts that span Growth, Verifications Platform, Risk/Decisioning, and Lending Partners
  • Align multiple teams around cohesive technical strategies and execution plans
• Evolve platform architecture
  • Drive decomposition of tightly coupled systems into scalable, reusable services and APIs
    Enable cross-product reuse across unsecured lending while maintaining system integrity
• Translate complex business problems into systems
  • Balance product velocity, risk constraints, compliance requirements, and long-term maintainability
    Partner deeply with product, risk, compliance, and operations to deliver measurable business outcomes
• Drive experimentation and intelligent automation
  • Elevate experimentation frameworks and data-driven iteration across the funnel
  • Identify and lead opportunities for AI-driven experiences (e.g., adaptive flows, conversational interfaces, automation)
• Raise the engineering bar
  • Establish best practices in system design, observability, testing, and operational excellence
  • Mentor senior and staff engineers and influence engineering culture across the organization
• Operate as a force multiplier
  • Provide technical leadership beyond the team, influencing architecture and strategy across Personal Loans and adjacent domains
  • Proactively identify long-term risks and opportunities, and drive alignment with leadership

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and scaling consumer-facing systems
• Proven experience operating at a Staff or Principal level, leading large, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and system design at scale
• Demonstrated experience decomposing or modernizing tightly coupled systems into modular components/services with clear interfaces, while maintaining…